Where the needle-sharp air once cut through the nostrils, a new perfume arrives. Dampness, newness, strangeness, familiarity, freshness and a hundred other contrasting scents…all are thrown together into that strange melding pot of aromas that assails the senses before all others. The air knows.
Days, so shrouded and portioned off into solitary secrecy by the darkness, find themselves again amongst the old shadows. As though at some great waking, the dawn arrives earlier, in search of kinship, bringing with it the gift of morning. The light knows.
Now, each time I glance beyond the rooflines, over the hills and above the sea, the first signs are evident that the colour has started to return: amber, pink and purple meld and merge in occluded brushstrokes at dawn and, from time to time, daytime rainbows garland the piercing blue. The sky knows.
Underfoot, the frost-locked ground, hard as stone for so long, unyielding and sharp as flint where the peaks of old footsteps froze one forgotten twilit afternoon weeks ago, has begun to soften and relent. Like new clay it gives gradually, ready for something new, each passer-by beginning to press their new story into its folds. The earth knows.
Where ice once locked the margins in a wintry grip, the rivers and streams begin to shake themselves free once again. The rains swell their levels and nudge the bankside vegetation into life as the slow flow sets each watery corner of the world in motion. The waters know.
The preludes begin. So often silent in the dark, the dawn chorus now strikes up earlier and earlier. First, one by one, then in number, they harmonise to dispel the soundlessness of winter with their glissando, adding timbre and texture to each new morning, The birds know.
Barely there, so often overlooked, the spindly outlines of plants and trees, charcoal black and grey, barely sketched out of nothingness, begin to fill out again. New buds, sudden and opportunistic, spring out and sketch the borders of our lives into being. The plants know.
Everything knows that it is almost time for the world to create itself anew, for spring to come once more.
